Mere Description Is Impossible
Emeth Hesed, October 5th, 2006
Leithart, quoting Lewis, about D.H. Lawrence’s idealistic and linguistic aims in attempting to “make dirty words clean.”
CS Lewis in a short essay on “Prudery and Philology” … words do carry a freight of historical meaning that cannot simply be shed by repeating vulgarities in polite company or in artsy novels. As soon as you seek to describe the human body or sexuality in words, as opposed to rendering it in a painting or drawing, Lewis says “you will fin that you have only four alternatives: a nursery word, an archaism, a word from the gutter, or a scientific word.” In short, “willy-nilly you must produce baby-talk, or Wardour Street, or coarseness, or technical jargon. . . . The words will force you to write as if you thought it either childish, or quaint, or contemptible, or of purely scientific interest. In fact, mere description is impossible. Language forces you to an implicit comment.”
Read the rest of the post, “Sexual Salvation in Lawrence” …
Nobody can be neutral no matter what. Hah.
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Interesting topic and well said. Though still, I do not think I agree entirely with the conclusion, that bringing formerly obscene words into “polite society” can be done, but that the result will be to transform the polite society into a slum.
I don’t think that the entrance of such words into “polite” society necessarily demeans that society. Instead, I think it renders such culture as “less polite.”
I think there is a gulf of difference between polite society and the society of the slum; and within the expanse of that gulf are any number of bedposts upon which one might hang his hat. The introduction to polite society of a word that seeks to realize and recognize “the bodiliness, the messiness, of actual intercourse” wouldn’t be enough to damn the society, but it help the society to remain “polite” either.
The thing is, what’s so great about polite? Time and place for it, sure? But really, all we mean when we speak of polite society is a society that clothes itself in lies, half-truths, and fabrications. It paints itself into an unrealistic corner, a facade that ends up fooling, well, most of its participants.
As believers, we value both truth and modesty. We take on our lives in a manner that exalts in truth and glories in honesty. But still, we do not rejoice in parading our inadequacies, in boasting in the effects of the fall. We are caught in between these mandates.
On the one hand, we should desire greater truth in advertising, less abstraction in our descriptions of the body and life. We should hope to be a frank people. Yet on the other, we sojourn in an old and diseased creation, one in which both body and life are the subject of taboo. It is for the sake of a crass and vulgar kingdom that we demure, that we speak so softly and with so little colour; for they would never understand. In their skewed reason, they would see us flaunt their taboos and believe us to be the unrighteous. It is for them and for our witness to them of the reality that subsumes us that we hedge a little and say, “I make love to my wife.”